Blog - Recent Posts

General - How to change the language of Power Apps Studio

How do we change the display language of Power Apps Studio? In this post, we'll take a brief look at the language settings and find out where to change the display language.

2021 Release Wave 1 - A review of the upcoming features for April - September 2021

The 2021 Release Wave 1 plan describes the Power Platform features that are scheduled for release between April 2021 and September 2021. What features have been planned for Power Apps? In this post, I'll provide a brief summary of the Power Apps features in the plan.

SharePoint - How to filter records by the current user

A common requirement is to filter SharePoint records by email address. This use case scenario often attracts many questions from app builders who struggle to implement this in a delegable way. In this post, I'll describe how to carry out this type of filtering in a delegable way.

Intro - How to build Canvas Apps with code

An exciting new experimental feature is the ability to extract and to edit the source code of canvas apps. This enables us to develop apps outside of Power Apps studio, integrate with source control systems, and to take advantage that more powerful IDEs such as Visual Studio Code offer. This post introduces this topic, and I'll describe how we can create a simple 'hello world' screen using Visual Studio Code.

General - How to display barcodes

Power Apps provides great support for scanning barcodes. How to display barcodes may not be as obvious. In this post, we'll look at a quick and easy way to display barcodes in a canvas app.

Location - Finding the closest location and and sorting records by distance, based on the current location of the user

Given a data source that contains a list of locations, which record matches the location that is nearest to an input location? This is typical challenge we face when we want to build a feature that, for example, returns a list of stores that is sorted in distance relative to the current location of a customer. In this post, we'll walk through the formula that enables us to carry out this calculation.

SQL - Caution! This is how users can hack shared SQL connections

Is your SQL Server data as secure as you think? If we create a shared 'implicit' connection, our database may be more open than we think. In this post, we'll look at how users can exploit the security vulnerability that is associated with this connection type.

SQL - How NOT to name database tables, columns, and objects

Tip - unexpected errors are less likely to occur when we adhere to simple naming conventions - eg, those without spaces and special characters. In this post, we'll examine a Power Apps bug that occurs when we reference columns that begin with a number.

Formulas - How to cope with weekends and public holidays in date calculations

Performing date calculations that take working days and public holidays into account can be complicated. This post summarises and verifies the formula to calculate the number of working days between two dates, and the formula to add a given number of working days to a start date.

Licensing - What license do I have?

A simple but important question that I see from time-to-time is - what license do I have? Here's where in the UI we can find this out.

Dataverse - How to Patch the 5 most complex data types

With Dataverse, the syntax to patch certain data types can look very complicated. In this post, we'll summarise the syntax to patch lookup, single choice, multi-choice, yes/no, single person/group, and multi person/group columns.

Controls - How to Transition/Show/Hide controls with a Sliding Effect

There's no built-in way to hide/show controls with a transition effect. The best workaround I suggest is to use a technique by Mr Dang. In this post, I highlight this technique and explain - what is an easing equation?

Formulas - How to calculate the distance between 2 points

We can calculate the distance between two longitude and latitude co-ordinates using a trigonometric calculation. It's a complex formula so in this post, we'll find out how exactly this works, including a verification of the result. We'll see how to perform this distance calculation in both kilometers and miles.

SharePoint - How to Patch the 6 most complex data types

With SharePoint, the syntax to patch certain data types can look very complicated. In this post, we'll summarise the syntax to patch lookup, single choice, multi-choice, yes/no, single person/group, and multi person/group columns.

GPS - 3 Frequent Questions about Location Services

Help - my app isn't picking up correct location/GPS values! If the location features aren't working, it might be due to these reasons that I most commonly see.